The title of this post is mostly ironic, because I don’t feel like I have to defend my life – not from Bryan’s comments or San Francisco Boy Toy’s snarky insults, not to my family who no longer communicate with me, or to my best friend who stopped talking to me years ago after he read this blog post about my being thrown out of my house. I may have spent some time being angry at Santosh for the abandonment, and I would have been justified in doing so, but grudges charge far too much for their upkeep. I also knew intimately a few of Santosh’s miseries and had shared in some of his pain over the years. During our relationship, I watched him engage in self-destructive, humiliating behavior, which hurt me because I worshipped him for all the things he seemed to hate about himself. Unfortunately, I tried far too hard to change him, correct him; I thought I had the answers for his life. I should have spent more time sheltering him, loving him – being the calm face of comfort he could look into and not feel judged.
Eventually, I was that kind of friend for him. But it took a long time, and along the way I did and said some things I was later ashamed of having done. If there’s one thing that such a wrenching & rewarding, fraught & joyful friendship taught me, is that other people are mysteries. Fragile mysteries. Violence, whether verbal or actual or emotional, breaks people much more quickly than we realize. No one seems to take enough care of the people they love, in my experience. Certainly not me. I have a habit, inherited by my mother and perfected by me, of writing off instantly anyone who slights me or injures me. For most people, counting to ten is enough. With me, it requires solving algebra problems.
People who insist on knowing what’s right for someone else and who attempt to enforce it, insist upon it, that’s not only inherently violent, it’s foolish. It’s hubris, and it’s unlovely; there’s nothing about love in it. Growing up in a Pentecostal church, I encountered a lot of such people, usually men, who thought they knew what was best, not only for themselves and for their children, for their church, but the whole world – for all those who didn’t believe in God exactly the way they did, for those who didn’t believe in God at all, and certainly for those who believed in another god entirely. Hell was waiting for all those people, and these men always seemed to take a kind of glee in predicting the lake of fire for the unbelievers. Envisioning another’s demise, often in great, lurid detail, and calling it love? That’s just another face of evil and I’ve spent most of the rest of my life staying as far away from people like that as I can, and living my life in a way that repudiates that worldview. By example, I’ve hoped.
The problem, you see, with having an inviolate moral code, is that it’s rigid; it’s an impossible goal. The fundamentalist can’t possibly live up to the code, precisely because it’s so unforgiving, and in a very basic way, a denial of what it is to be human. And so, in his guilt and self-revulsion, he wields it like a brickbat at everyone else, or stumbles over his own contradictions, which are inevitably multitudinous. Fundamentalism itself fuels the hypocrisy so often found in right-wing churches, and the toilet stalls nearby, as well as in the vocation of the priesthood in the Catholic church. But you can witness the hubris of the fundamentalist in other places, other milder forms. On the relatively harmless end of the continuum, you have busy-bodies and buttinskis; further in, we find judgmental ideologues and bigots. On the far end of the continuum, you get zealots who blow up abortion clinics, or slaughter the aristocracy, or fly planes into buildings, hoping for some action from after-life virgins.
I want to live as far away from fundamentalism as I possibly can, and that’s one reason why I live in an anti-Communist and atheistic country. I want my approach to life, to my own failings and the failings of others, to be fluid, persuadable, amenable, and prone to forgiveness, at least as I understand it. (You can see from my story about making Pavel cry that I sometimes fail to live up to my own standards.) If I am ever dead sure of something, I can be fairly certain that I don’t know what I’m talking about, and need to take a step back and look at some other ways of seeing. In my own life right now, I’m not sure at all that I’m doing the right thing so when I hear others slamming me, often unkindly, for how I’ve chosen to live my life, I experience doubt, sometimes awful, empty doubt that I can’t easily assuage. And that’s as it should be. It means I’m human. I’m not a fundamentalist. I can be bent, and I’m surely often wrong.
On the other hand, I’m just as certain that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about when I detect the absolute certainty contained in some lines Bryan wrote, such as “That constant and insistent deep well of hatred that you know you feel like a dormant volcano in your gut every waking moment,”
He knows. Just what I feel. The origins of my anger. The birth of my greed.
Now how could he know all that? What hubris. What arrogance. The hubris and arrogance of someone utterly assured that he is right, not only about his own life choices, but about mine. He knows what’s in my heart. Strip the comment of the specifics, much of similarly hyperbolic or hypocritical, and that is the sum of his whole argument. He knows me better than I know myself. He said that very thing in a previous comment: “I can know you, but you will never know me.” But what he’s really after is to dissuade those who read and support me from doing so. He’s taken this tack before. For several weeks back during the Christian Terrorist Theatrical Troupe debacle, his entire blog was nothing but an attempt to character-assassinate me. Seems it didn’t work, but yet he’s at it again.
Further, it’s obscene to characterize such comments as emblematic of “love” when they contain lines such as this: “Even your staunchest supporters will one day have to cut you lose [sic.] because they are too self-reliant to allow anyone else to suck the life out of them until they’re just an empty and penniless husk, which is what it would take and even then not begin to satisfy the bottomless black void of need and greed within you.” OK, so the purple prose is laughable, and typical of Bryan, but what a feat to so blithely condescend, not only to me, but to everyone who supports and reads me – those people I’ve fooled with my lies and duplicity, having “pulled the wool over their eyes.” Yet in a previous paragraph, Bryan admits to grudgingly admiring me for this skill, which apparently I practice so effortlessly. He paints a picture of a near inhuman sociopath but also admits to wanting to emulate him, at least in that capacity.
Bryan resorts to circular arguments. Don’t read or support Rick because he’s a bad person; he’s deceived you; he’s a liar. (I’m beginning to believe that at least a few of the anonymous SMSs came from Bryan. True or False, Homer?) His evidence for this? Why, it’s because I’m so good at it. Huh?
But, I shouldn’t be too surprised. You would not have to look very far to find an oeuvre filled with such contradictions. Contradicting himself is one of the things Bryan does best. Now, Bryan’s attacking me for the choices I’ve made that have ended up with my being homeless ; not so long ago he was defending me from attackers with similar accusations. In the past, indeed he has been one of the bull dogs in my corner, ranting and raving convincingly about the value of outsiders and those going against the grain of society’s expectations. Now he’s warning me that I might end up dead before I get anything from my work, just as another “friend” worried about my ending up in an unmarked grave in Prague. These dire fantasy projections reflect love?
You might also ask Bryan, that if he cleverly characterizes what I do as “pan-handling,” what does he call the mass e-mailing he conducted and the resulting donation of $5000 USD that enabled him to leave Prague, where he was crownless and jobless, and couldn’t have paid the rent without my contributions? Knowing Bryan, he’d call it an act of compassionate charity, or maybe a gift from God. Which must make me the child of Satan. But, oh, whoops, he didn’t make it to China, did he? And ended up homeless for a month in Brussels. And what happened to all that money, Bryan? It’s none of my business, but these are relevant stones to throw in this situation, don’t you think? Some might even call this comparison as revealing, oh, I don’t know, maybe hypocrisy? Not quite as clear-cut as a four-time boyfriend stealer accusing a former colleague of stealing someone’s boyfriend, but nonetheless damning.
*****
I’m not even sure what my own moral code is. If I had to write it down as a series of dictums, I would give up. I don’t think that’s the way the world works, and I don’t think that’s how the consciences of individuals work. To be sure, my moral code is self-centered and luckily, since I don’t believe in a deity or an infallible moral handbook which has a priori decided for me what is right and what is wrong, I have two gauges, two questions I ask myself to make sure I’m doing all right. 1) Do I hate myself? I guess this is another way of asking if I feel shame, or a burden of guilt that I rationalize away. 2) Do I have friends that love and value me? If I can answer yes, more or less, to those questions, at any given time, or for any given situation, I figure I’m doing OK. There is one last way I judge myself, and though it’s not a moral question, for me, as an artist, it carries the impact of morality. Will I leave something behind that will affect, interest, engage others? Will someone, someone who didn’t even know me personally, remember me when I’m gone? I don’t know that yet and I will always live in doubt of that fact. Still, one of the things that keeps me going, working, writing is the hope that this is true. Sure, I want to live in the now and have fun in the now and affect people in the now, as Bryan also wants, and I am doing that, judging from the amount and quality of the e-mails and comments overwhelmingly in support of me.
For the first time in a very long time, I publicly asked for money for a specific goal: When I wanted to go the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. I didn’t expect that I would get a lot of donations, but I did, some for people I didn’t even realize had read the blog. At the end of the request for sponsorship, I’d collected almost 1000 USD. Enough to go the Fest, enjoy myself comfortably and then come back to Prague with money for a couple weeks. I was overwhelmed and heartened. I don’t know everyone’s motivations for donating, a lot of it may have been simple pity, all I know is that somebody out there likes me. I can’t expect that kind of outpouring all the time, but it felt good to know people were paying attention. To those who could not afford to contribute, but are nonetheless supportive and active in comments and e-mails, I appreciate your contributions just as much.
I’m not alone, and I have friends.
****
So “What kind of man am I?” was really the question I thought about when I began writing this post. Probably because the tenor of Bryan’s comments has been moralistic. I’m not just stupid for living my life the way I do, I’m immoral for refusing, in his view, to take a “normal” job. As he has, presumably. (It would not take much searching on his blog or in the comments he’s made to read about his defending the very opposite, but only, apparently, when it suits his purpose at the time or he’s not mad at me.) Since what he most wants is to convince those of you who support me to come to their senses and since there’s no way to do that using mere evidence, an ideologue like Bryan must resort to moralism. Though he doesn’t quite stoop to smearing, he comes awfully close. I guess he’s repented of ever having called me an “irredeemable sociopath” or a “worthless person,” although he’s never apologized on the blog proper for saying those words, and refused to publish comments of mine when some supporters of his wrote words that I felt were demeaning. Now, I’m just a “black void of greed and need” and I’m carrying around a “well of hatred.” Sorry, Bryan, but I don’t recognize that caricature, and doubt anyone who knows me recognizes it either.
What kind of man am I? I don’t know for sure but I’ll tell you a story:
Several months ago, I had moved in with Bryan as a last resort. The lease for the apartment in Zizkov had ended and I had no where to go. From Bryan’s blog, I knew he wasn’t doing so well for money. Money, I had; an apartment I didn’t.
I tend to take the easy way out when I’m dealing with the practical issues real life, the path of least resistance. I really didn’t see how, given the sort of rent-boy loving life I lead, I could move in with your normal English-teaching ex-pats. I tried it once and it was a disaster. In addition, better the Devil you know… Maybe Bryan felt the same way, because he let me move in.
I didn’t mind so much living with Bryan, the second time. Internet was free and Bryan kept to himself. He also successfully made sure his boys respected my space. On the other hand, despite the fact that I was paying nearly half the rent, I still lived in the kitchen on an uncomfortable twin-size bed. (The ground, with a sleeping pad, really is more comfortable for me.) By contrast, Bryan had paid the same amount in my flat for his own, much bigger room, with a much bigger bed. But, whatever. Beggars can’t be choosy. So, when anyone ever wanted a beer, or wanted to make a late-night snack, it usually woke me up. Plus, Bryan is absolutely the loudest person I’ve ever lived with. His every gesture is like the beginning of an avalanche. That drove me crazy but I never lost my temper about that issue. I figured, being an adult, someone had to have told him about it before, and he was simply unable to do anything about it. How was I going to change him? I didn’t want confrontation; in fact, I wanted to be left alone as much as possible. I was a very good boy, I thought. So, I bought earplugs. I also still considered it his flat. I was just renting from him, and tried to give a commensurate amount of respect because of that fact.
Most of Bryan’s exodus from Prague is depicted on his blog, Homersexual. (You can search for it yourself. No links from me anymore.) Most of it is there anyway, with some missing details. Interesting missing details, from my perspective.
One was that Bryan owed the landlord money and didn’t tell me that he did. When I paid Bryan my portion of the rent, I figured he had his covered as well. That was not the case, however. My understanding was that Bryan also owed the landlord money from a previous month. (This was the second time I’d paid rent. I don’t why Bryan didn’t use my first rent payment to pay down his debt. He must have had his reasons. I could speculate, and so could you. But we won’t.) A couple days later, after at least one piko party that I knew about, Bryan told me that the landlord was going to throw us out. (I was also living there in the black; if the landlord knew I was staying there permanently the rent would have been more.) After paying what I had assumed to be a month’s rent, a day or two later I was told that we had to leave. Inside, I panicked. Outside, I remember being stoic. I didn’t blow up. Rather than have both of us thrown out on the streets, I was willing to make up whatever deficit there was. Honestly, from this vantage point, I don’t remember what was done, or if I even made the offer. Regardless, Bryan had a long talk with the landlord and somehow averted disaster.
All of that is to be expected from someone, two someones, who both live close to the edge. I relay all that not to point fingers, or claim Bryan as a bad person, but to remind Bryan and everyone who reads him that, just like me, he can play a little fast and loose with money, someone else’s money in this case, and he seemed to have his priorities a bit skewed. If I had had so little money, I would not have allowed so many boys to live with me. That’s what I did my last few months in the Zizkov apartment: Winnowed out the deadbeats.
Readers of Bryan’s blog may remember that his money was running out, he’d lost his English-teaching jobs, but that he got a job offer to teach in China. He therefore made a series of pleas via e-mail, asking for help. He got it, and then some. An elderly couple donated $5000 to get him to China, and I believe he received money from other generous patrons as well. I was happy for him, but of course this complicated my rental situation. If he left, I would have to pay 12, 500 crowns on my own. In addition, he informed me that he’d already told the landlord he was moving out on the first. Which meant, once again, that I’d paid for a month’s rent and was only going to get 15 days in return. I said nothing. Bryan had all this money, and since I believed him to be honest, I was fairly certain that he’d give me back half. I’d had a few unpleasant confrontations with Bryan when he was in my flat and was determined to avoid them. All we did was talk past each other. So I kept mum, but Bryan also never mentioned the obvious – that unless he gave me back at least some of my money, then he was screwing me over. But rather than raise the issue, I thought that if he was going to do the right thing, then he’d do right thing. If not, I’d just have to deal, but would know just that much more about him.
He did the right thing. On the last day he was in Prague, he not only refunded my money, but he also gave me an extra 1000 because of the state in which he’d left his room. I seem to remember more money being handed over just because he felt guilty, as well.
I was relieved. Relieved to have been treated fairly; even more relieved that he was leaving Prague. For good, I hoped at the time.
****
“Heyulp! Heyulp!” I thought I heard one morning, coming faintly through the thin wall.
I had one earplug in; one had fallen out; and I was still half-asleep. So I wasn’t sure I’d heard anything.
Then came a crash, and some guttural, angry expressions in Czech. Something was happening in Bryan’s room. I knew there were at least two boys in there. One was Daniel. I thought a minute and concluded that Daniel wouldn’t be making such a ruckus. He was too passive. It had to be the other boy, Jaro, a veteran Pinocchio boy, and inveterate piko abuser. I didn’t know much about him, other than a feeling from my gut that told me not to trust him. When I first met him in Bryan’s flat, I’d been charmed. After a couple weeks of observing him, and detecting a wicked, condescending edge to his interactions with Bryan, I was no longer charmed, and thereafter avoided him.
I propped myself up on one arm and fumbled for my glasses. Putting them on, I listened to the continuing conflagration in the next room, and heard Bryan call for help a couple more times. I thought: Should I get involved or should I not? There was no lock on the kitchen door, so it was quite possible that whatever was happening could spill over into my room whether I wanted it to or not. More importantly, could I just lie here while something bad was happening to Bryan? I may not have liked Bryan very much, but he was a blogger, an American, and besides, I liked piko-crazed Czech šlapky even less.
I heard another thud, which sounded like bone on flesh, or flesh on bone, heard Bryan call for help again and mention the police. I made up my mind.
When I came into Bryan’s room I saw Bryan, tears running down his face, trying to avoid Jaro, who was stalking about the room ranting, “Give me my money, Bryan!” Jaro had his arm cocked, ready to hit Bryan again. (The next day Bryan had quite the shiner and it had just made me sad looking at it.) I stood there in the doorway a bit, trying to figure out what the fuck was happening. Station Daniel sat on the sofa, chewing his fingernails, eyes wide and staring glassily forward. I thought at the time that he must retreat into that inner room so often that it’s a natural response to confrontation for him.
Jaro’s natural response threatened more violence. He looked more than a little crazed: Eyes big and wide-open, mouth curled in contempt, spit flying out of his mouth at each outburst. I was certain that amphetamines were behind this performance, but I’d always suspected he was capable of what I was seeing.
[I can't give a blow-by-blow account of that morning because I honestly can't remember much clearly, particularly what happened when. Emotion-clouded memories. If I get some details wrong, I apologize. I'm not going to consult Bryan's blog because, well, I don't want to and because this is my account, not his. Just keep in mind, that in Bryan's account, everything I'm writing below is contained in the paraphrase: Rick got in his face at one point.]
Through distraught tears, Bryan managed to explain to me that he owed Jaro money. He had told Jaro that he would pay him back the next morning. The next morning, this morning, Jaro woke Bryan up with a fist to his head, and seemed intent on beating the crap out of Bryan until he handed over the money.
Bryan, rather desperately, seemed more intent on pointing out to Jaro the error of his ways, reminding him that they were friends, that he had told him he’d pay him back, etc. etc.
I suggested two things: Call the police, or go to the ATM and pay him back. Either way, let’s get rid of him.
At the time, I wondered why the hell Bryan wasn’t hurrying to make one of those two things happen. There was a lot of commotion, and yelling back and forth – Bryan got on his clothes to go get the money – when Jaro made another lunge for Bryan. Finally I had had enough. I stood in between Jaro and Bryan, put my hand on Jaro’s chest and said, “Please, no hitting. Please, Jaro.” He turned his head away, seemed to calm down, but suddenly went apeshit again, trying to get past me and to Bryan.
“Hey, hey, hey!” I said, and got angry.
Any confrontation I’ve ever had with a Czech boy has resulted in the boy’s backing down. Every one. Even the boys who could have obviously beaten the crap out of me. This track record must have made me a little cocky. Jaro didn’t back down. He just got angrier. He asked me what I was going to do about it. I think I said something stupid like, “Why don’t you try me and find out?”
At that point, I had the good sense to realize I couldn’t take him. I’d seen him repeatedly try to pound on Bryan and knew he wasn’t going to leave until he got the money; maybe not even then. He was behaving like an animal. Bryan seemed unable to resolve or contain the situation, though I kept hoping he’d call the police. I guess he was worried again about the drug paraphernalia scattered throughout his room. I made a decision quickly. Here was an aggressive attacker in front of me. He would not leave when asked. He was a criminal at that point, in spite of the fact that he kept insisting he’d call the police on Bryan for being a drug addict, among other things. (Speaking of hypocrites.) I wanted to end the confrontation quickly and effectively. I’d taken one self-defense course, given in conjunction with Chicago gay pride, and had remembered one thing: Go for their eyes. Our instructor had informed us that it was actually quite easy to scoop out someone’s eyeballs, and it pretty much ensured that your attacker would back down. Since I was already in his face, and he hadn’t actually taken a swing at me yet, though he’d faked a couple, I went for it: I suddenly aimed both thumbs at his eyes and pushed up and then down.
Before I tell you the results of that action, I will have to admit to how angry I was, and the anger had multiple origins. First, I hate piko users. I hate bullies. I hate most of the Czechs. I hate arrogant rent boys who think they’re hot shit because they used to get fucked in the ass for 5000 crowns, but now are really just big worthless pieces of shit and blights on the landscape. I hated being pulled into this situation and hated still more that it was happening where I lived. I hated the fact that I felt obligated to defend Bryan. Looking into Jaro’s smug, fucked-up face, I definitely felt like I was boiling in a big cauldron of hate, and more than anything, in that fiery, reckless moment, I hated Jaro.
Which was my mistake. If I’d been calm and focused, I might have succeeded in disabling him. Instead, almost as soon as I began the gouge, it dawned on me what I was doing. He was so surprised that he’d fallen onto the sofa behind, but my own impulse, once my fingers felt eyeballs, was to let him go. Which was when he lashed out and knocked my glasses onto the floor. I staggered backwards, tripped over Daniel’s long legs – through all this, he said and did nothing; maybe the only smart one among us – and fell onto the other end of the sofa. Jaro charged after me, and when I tried to get up to face him, he punched me in the nose, with his palm. My whole body jolted, I hurtled back again onto the sofa stunned.
Not made to look silly enough, I guess, I did get up again. There was another short scuffle during which I yelled at Bryan to find my glasses on the floor, instead of trying to bitch slap Jaro. Suddenly, my glasses were all I could think about: My 12,000 kc glasses which I could not afford to replace and without which I could not see. My prescription is +9 diopters, both eyes.
Although my cartoon attempt at self-defense didn’t quite have the desired result, Jaro seemed so dumbfounded, perhaps grudgingly admiring, at my attempt to fight back – he actually got impatient at Bryan for not find my glasses fast enough – that the situation calmed down, all of us reduced to looking around the room, at our bodies, and evaluating the damage. Besides Bryan’s black eye, and my sore nose, during the final scuffle I managed to rip Jaro’s sweater at the neck, damage I had to pay for later, or suffer more violence. My glasses had also been bent in half, each arm flush with the other. I bent them back in place, more or less, though they’ve never sat on my face correctly since.
I have trouble remembering much of the details after that. There might have been more violence or attempts at violence, but I retreated, and hid in the my room. I pulled the table and a chair up next to the door and blocked it. Jaro got his money and left. Apparently, Jaro hit Bryan again outside on the sidewalk on the way to the ATM. I felt terrorized and humiliated, felt uneasy for the next couple of days, as well. I flinched involuntarily when I saw Jaro on the street the next week. He accosted me as if nothing had happened, as if we were old friends.
Before Bryan left for “China,” he had a going away party at Monty. On his tab. With Jaro and his girlfriend, and with a couple other boys I can barely stand.
I was invited. But, you won’t be surprised when I tell you, I politely declined.
